A number of years ago, I saw Amazon had a sale on the blu-ray for Studio Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies. About all I knew about the film was it had an excellent reputation as one of the best feature films that the famed Japanese animation studio had ever produced. I did buy it, but then I didn’t watch it for a while. At some point, I did learn what the film was about, and it is rather depressing in its subject matter. That shouldn’t be a surprise: Hayao Miyazaki, probably the most famous of the Studio’s founders, is a noted pacifist. I would image the other two, including Grave of the Fireflies director Isao Takahata, feels much the same way. And quite frankly, I would think that a film that tells how two young siblings both die a slow and painful death in the closing days of the Second World War,\ probably shouldn’t be a celebration of violence.
Plus, given Japan’s experience as a nation when it comes to nuclear war, there’s probably nothing shocking about the nation’s aversion to war. Regardless, I had a reason to watch my blu-ray since Grave of the Fireflies seems to be the only major Studio Ghibli film not available on Max.
As it is, the deaths of the two main characters isn’t really a shock to the viewer: the film opens with teenage Seita’s ghost watching himself die of starvation in a train station, one of many such boys, and his narration even telling the viewer that this is the moment he died. A candy tin tossed aside by a janitor spills open to reveal some ashes and a handful of small bones. From there, the ghost of Seita’s kid sister Setsuko forms, and the two take a spirit train to whatever the afterlife will be for these two. And though I don’t think either of them have their ages mentioned, Seita is about 14 or so and Setsuko is about 5 or 6. From this moment, the film flashes back to how the pair lost their mother during a firebombing by the Americans, and from there, ending with Setsuko’s slow death by malnutrition and subsequent cremation by her big brother.
Now, it would be easy to point the finger at the invading Americans as the cause of the children’s slow and eventual death, but the film doesn’t do that. The Americans aren’t innocent, but they’re also distant figures, seen only as aircraft flying over the countryside and dropping explosives. I would imagine if, say, the children were killed by the atom bomb that the film might be more inclined to just blame the Americans and be done with it. But no, a lot of what goes wrong for the children is the fact the war exists at all, that both sides in the conflict are making things bad for the children, and there are selfish people who can’t or won’t share what they have with a pair of innocent kids. That level of selfishness is seen perhaps best in the children’s aunt. This nameless woman, from the moment she appears, makes it clear she isn’t much interested in saving the children. The children’s absent father is a naval officer, and as a member of the military, his family gets regular food rations. That’s one of the first things the aunt mentions when she first takes the children in, and even when she is being nice, there’s an undercurrent that she’s only doing it for herself and her own family. Her niece and nephew are not included in that assessment.
Furthermore, the film has multiple moments of Japanese nationalism, for lack of a better word, making things a bit worse for all involved. During the firebombing that ultimately kills the children’s mother, one man gets up to declare, “Long live the Emperor!” as the American planes depart and the village behind him burns to the ground. The aunt frequently plays up how her husband and older teenage daughter work for a factory to the greater good of the nation, and eventually takes to berating Seita for not doing the same. And when the nationalism doesn’t make things worse, greed still plays a part. Seita doesn’t tell Setsuko that their mother is dead, but the girl finds out when the aunt suggests selling the dead woman’s kimonos for rice. The plan works, but after a period, the aunt decides the rice is actually something she earned and starts to seem a lot less willing to share with the two children. Likewise, she keeps asking Seita if he wrote to his father with requests for, I dunno, more rations or something.
All this would make for a depressing film by itself, but the plot then does something else to try to both increase the impact of Setsuko’s death and maybe lighten the mood a bit, and that’s to show that much of the film’s running time is Seita doing his best to hide how bad things are to his juvenile sister, doing what he can to take care of her and keeping her from learning the worst. That can be as simple as strongly telling her not to talk the man she presumes has fallen asleep on the beach when the man is obviously dead or mixing some water inside an empty candy tin to give her a treat in the form of candy-flavored water. That means taking her to play and teaching her about the world around her, including showing girl the wonders of fireflies.
And even though Setsuko’s death is a forgone conclusion, and even though there are clues at various points in the film that shows she isn’t doing well such as mystery rashes and complaints of hunger, and even a moment when Setsuko digs a grave for a mound of dead fireflies–showing that she isn’t unaware of what death is–it is still an awful and slow-moving event to watch this lively girl die. True, I found the voice of the character a bit annoying, but she’s a little girl, and arguably the thing that kept the two alive was Setsuko, during the initial bombing, slowing Seita down by asking him to grab her doll and a few other things before they run out of the house. Setsuko is the thing that keeps Seita going. He steals farmer’s crops for her when they get hungry, trades away everything he can, even empties out the family bank account to buy a small stove when their aunt decides to stop feeding them, forcing them to feed themselves. Given the end of the film is Seita’s moving on with a handful of Setsuko’s ashes in the candy tin, it maybe isn’t that big a surprise that he dies soon afterward. The opening scene depicting his death mentioned the Americans were coming soon and the bodies needed to be disposed of before then, and Seita learns that the Emperor surrendered unconditionally before his sister passed. Presumably had the two held out just a little bit longer, they would have been fine. But that would have undermined the message here that war isn’t good for anybody, not even children presumably safe far from the front.
For what it is worth, when I went looking for images for this entry on Google Images, I learned there was a live action version of Grave of the Fireflies released to Japanese television in 2005. Since the story was originally adapted from an autobiographical short story, it follows that other adaptations could follow, and from what I have learned of the live action remake, that version uses the aunt’s daughter, who survived the war, to act as a framing device narrator, one who realized what her mother did was wrong from the beginning. That character I don’t think even speaks in the animated version, but all I will say for now is regardless of the quality of the live action story, I don’t think this story could be told more powerfully than it did in animation.
NEXT: Looks like I got another film about how war causes suffering. The difference is, I can feel bad for Seita and Setsuko. I can’t quite bring myself to sympathize with Scarlet O’Hara in 1939’s Gone with the Wind.
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